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The article reports that the Committee on House of Representatives in the U.S. has approved the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act that would require touch-screen voting systems to provide a paper receipt for each ballot cast. The bill was sponsored by Representative Rush Holt, which according to the author, has long been a critic of touch screen systems that fail to produce a voter-verified paper trail. Holt expresses that the results of U.S. elections will always be uncertain until voting systems are required to produce a voter-verified paper ballot.

The article focuses on issues relating to voter-verified paper ballots with direct electronic recording (DRE) machines. Calls for the U.S. government to require that electronic voting machines produce voter-verified paper trails ran into opposition from two members of a Senate committee during a hearing on e-voting. Voting accuracy advocates and some lawmakers have repeatedly called for printers to be attached to e-voting machines to ensure their accuracy. Five bills introduced in Congress this year would require voter-verified paper ballots with DRE machines. DRE paper trails would reassure voters that ballots are being counted correctly. Two computer scientists disagreed over the effectiveness of voter-verified paper-trail ballots. DREs are tested before and after elections, and election officials have better forensic tools to find errors on DREs than on other types of ballots.

The article reports on the technical problems and the challenges faced by the board of elections with the electronic voting systems in the U.S. In Colorado, technical and procedural problems of the machines arise in both registration and voting. Voters in Florida find difficulties in viewing the candidates that they will vote for due to touch-screen systems malfunction. However, co-director of Voter Action Holly Jacobson stresses that the reported machine malfunctions were misleading. Spokesman Alan Melamed of the board of elections emphasizes the used of paper ballots for those voters affected with machine malfunctions. Moreover, elections judge in Maryland Avi Rubin stresses is opposition on the voting system since the system still lack adequate security measures. INSET: Critics Split on Whether to Abandon DREs.

The article reports on the growing criticism of the proposed legislation which requires that all touch-screen voting machines must provide a paper trail in the U.S. Due to the delay for a congressional vote of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act which aims to address security and reliability flaws in electronic voting machines, criticisms increased while its losing the support of the bill's co-sponsor Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. Critics from voter advocacy groups and analysts regard the bill to offer the public a false sense of security to the voter. These critics further suggest that rather than requiring a paper trails for electronic voting, the banning of touch-screen systems must be considered primarily.

The article discusses the technical and security-related glitches of the touch screen electronic voting systems and software from Diebold Election Systems in the U.S. With the use of the system, also called direct recording equipment, paper ballots are no longer needed thus, ensuring safer voting. The voting machines includes a thermal printer where the printed summary reassures the voter and provides a paper-based alternative that officials can use to verify the electronic tabulations. Computers have helped become easier and faster in terms of reading and tallying votes.

This article reports on the decision of a federal judge in a California directive that decertified touch-screen voting machines and withheld future certification until vendors of those systems can meet specific security requirements as of July 2004. The decision arose from a lawsuit, Benavidez v. Shelley, brought by disability rights advocates and four California counties that oppose California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's requirement for voter-verifiable paper audit trails. The counties also oppose Shelley's order to decertify direct-recording equipment (DRE) voting systems. The plaintiffs argued that banning the systems would disenfranchise visually or physically impaired voters. The opinion written by Judge Florence-Marie Cooper was given. Cooper noted that Shelley is responsible for ensuring that votes are counted accurately, and requiring a paper audit trail is one way of fulfilling that obligation. State and local elections officials around the country are scrambling to ensure that e-voting systems in different jurisdictions are reliable and can be secured from tampering in time for the November election. The decision follows the release of a report two weeks ago by an IT security panel that outlined a strategy for certifying the security and reliability of touch-screen DRE voting systems QuickLink 47931.

Information technology security researchers in the U.S. said they have uncovered significant vulnerabilities in the electronic voting systems that will be used by nearly 30% of all registered voters in the presidential election in November 2004. In testimony before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in May 2004, security researchers said that without voter-verifiable paper receipts, the 50 million Americans who will use electronic voting machines this fall will have no way of knowing if their votes were subject to electronic tampering. Moreover, the code base powering the systems is so large and complex that there is no efficient way for election officials to be sure that it is free of malicious code designed to manipulate election results. Avi Rubin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute in Baltimore, Maryland said his biggest concern is the threat of individuals who have access to the code base rigging the election. Rubin recently had 40 Doctorate candidates design Trojan horse programs to assess the security of the electronic voting systems. The IT vendors that make the systems in question sought to discredit Rubin's research by characterizing it as laboratory work that has little relevance to a real-world voting environment. Some also complained that until last year, election officials were more interested in usability improvements than in better security

The article reports on the appeal by California Senator Dianne Feinstein to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in February 2007 to conduct an investigation of electronic voting machines that failed to produce paper receipts for the ballot cast. She called on the GAO for the completion of the investigation before the presidential election in 2008. Also included in the investigation are the claims of electronic-voting critics that these machines are prone to error and can be easily altered or hacked.

This article reports on the initiative taken by the federal board in the U.S. toward electronic voting machines that include independent audit mechanisms. The proposal would require that new direct recording electronic voting machines provide independently verifiable voting records such as voter-verified paper-trail printouts. The plan is offered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee. A final proposal will be submitted to the Election Assistance Commission.

The article reports the case of Randy Wooten, a mayoralty candidate in Waldenburg, Arkansas who blamed the electronic voting for having zero votes during the final count. Wooten claims that he and his wife had voted for his name so he should have had at least two votes during the count. Wooten's wife blames the machine used during the election saying that the machine was really touchy and if the voter did not touch it just right exactly where he or she wants it, the vote would jump to other candidate's name. The spokesman of the Election Systems & Software Inc., the company who made the touch screen machine used during the elction, states that the equipment has no problem based on the analysis of the paper voting logs in the machine.

The article reflects on the technical problems of the electronic voting machines that could cause vote flipping in the U.S. Several complaints of vote flipping arises during the early voting, despite the assurance of the elections officials that the votes were not changed. To address the concern, an investigation led by professor David L. Dill of the Stanford University is conducted to determine the cause of vote-flipping incidents. The investigation found that the technical problems of the machines could be caused by voter error, where voters accidentally touched a screen and erroneously making a selection. Furthermore, professor Avi Rubin stresses paper records of every ballot cast as the alternative way to be safe from vote flipping.

This article reports on concerns regarding the adoption of electronic (e)-voting systems in the U.S. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report contending that questions about the security and accuracy of e-voting systems are likely to continue into the 2006 elections. The GAO called on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to define security policies and set up a machine certification program. In addition, no guidelines have been set up to ensure that machines meet the federal requirements. For example, a number of local officials want to implement e-voting systems that provide paper trails, but there are no federal criteria for doing so.

This article reports the introduction of legislative bill by a group of U.S. lawmakers requiring that electronic touch-screen voting machines allow a voter-verifiable paper trail. The Voting Integrity and Verification Act would require printed ballots that voters could check after using an electronic voting machine. The bill, introduced by Senator John Ensign, would add clarifying language to the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002.

The article reports that a federal appeals court in Florida last week ruled that a challenge to the use of some electronic voting machines in the state can be heard by a U.S. district court judge there, even though a parallel case is already moving through the state court system. The federal lawsuit, filed in March 2004 by Republican Robert Wexler and several co-plaintiffs, alleges that 15 of the state's most populous counties use e-voting machines that don't produce a paper trail of the votes being cast.

Former Vermont governor and onetime presidential hopeful Howard Dean joined fellow Democrats at their party's national convention in Boston, Massachusetts in August 2004 to spotlight the need for secure voting systems that can be audited. Dean joined U.S. Representative Rush Holt (D-N.J.) and others at a news conference to a plank in the Democratic Party's 2004 platform that calls for voting systems to be accessible, independently auditable, accurate and secure. The Democrats took the occasion to excoriate Republicans in the U.S. Congress and state governments who have blocked legislation mandating a paper trail for votes cast using electronic voting machines. Dean said he initially heard about security problems with e-voting machines while running for the Democratic nomination and dismissed the complaints coming from conspiracy whackos. A closer look convinced Dean of the seriousness of the issues, which he said threaten to undermine democracy in the U.S. if left unaddressed. In perhaps the most impassioned presentation, U.S. Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) railed against resistance within Ohio's Republican-dominated state government and at the federal level to address the issue of voting security. in addition, many state elections official misunderstood the provisions of that law and rushed to buy expensive e-voting machines pushed by vendors like Diebold Inc. before concerns about security could be addressed.

Chief executive officers (CEO) from some of the largest information technology companies in the U.S. told members of the U.S. Senate that they need more help from the government to battle global software piracy, level the global economic playing field and more effectively explain to U.S. people the benefits of offshore outsourcing. The appearance of the executives, including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Symantec's John Thompson, and Adobe System's Bruce Chizen, marked the launch of the Business Software Alliance's National CEO Initiative to address education, workforce development, innovation, trade, intellectual property and security. All of the 11 CEO present agreed that while the debate over offshore outsourcing will likely be a central issue in the November presidential election, intellectual property theft and global trade obstacles present a more immediate threat to the health of the IT industry and the U.S. economy. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) urged a group of high-profile information technology vendor CEO to help ensure the integrity and accuracy of the millions of votes that will be cast electronically in the 2004 presidential election. Clinton's remarks came on the same day that California approved the nation's first set of standards governing how e-voting systems are to produce a verifiable paper audit trail--a central issue in the now-heated debate about the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines that will be used throughout the country in the November election QuickLink 46735. Avi Rubin, a professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute and a central figure in the debate about the security of e-voting systems in the U.S., said there is a big difference between the electromechanical systems that were used in India and the Windows-based computers being used for e-voting in the U.S. INSET: Senator Questions E-voting Security.

Election officials in San Bernardino County, Calif., announced plans to defy a state-imposed ban on the electronic systems in the upcoming November 2004 presidential election. In a statement on May 11, 2004, county officials said they plan to use touch-screen voting systems developed by Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. The decision is in direct defiance of an April 30, 2004 directive by the California secretary of state that stripped the systems of their certification in 10 counties, pending security improvements. The directive also banned the use of touch-screen systems from McKinney, Diebold Election Systems in four other counties. The controversy over the use of the systems stems from research and public statements by independent IT security experts who uncovered glaring security vulnerabilities in the hardware and software used in many of the e-voting systems on the market. Jeremy Epstein, senior director for product security at WebMethods Inc. is one of thousands of private-sector executives who have signed an online petition that calls for vendors to provide voter-verified paper audit trails for their systems.